Tag: Composer

APIs are always fun to me, because you gain access to a large pool of information. Today I want to take a quick look at how to access the Google Books API with PHP. The code snippets and general knowledge should be applicable to all kinds of other Google APIs like YouTube or Google+.

Requirements

To access the Google API you will need an API key, which firstly requires you to register a project as a developer and then register your application as a client for the Google Books API. I have heavily screenshotted that process, because I didn’t find it very intuitive.

Secondly I’ll be using Composer for the ones that have php executable in their command line, most likely MacOS and Linux users. If you don’t want anything to do with composer, you can also download the Google API client manually from github.

The Laravel project has made a pretty smart move, that now is also in their quick start guide. They enable you to install it directly through composer! I’ve written about composer once when I ran into a little quirky bug on MacOS.